Recently we had the opportunity to ask Jeetu Patel, Cisco’s executive vice president of security and collaboration, about an particularly important and relevant topic in 2022 – resiliency – and how organisations can cope with an increasing number of attacks.

Patel began by noting that the organisations that have thrived over the past couple of years have been those that are broadly resilient. “They were resilient in the face of financial uncertainty, operational uncertainty, and very importantly, they had to be resilient against security uncertainty.”

‘’That is why we are focusing on ensuring that any business can be resilient from attacks that are constantly occurring against them from a security standpoint and making sure that if a breach even were to happen, they are resilient against that breach,’’ he continued.

Patel’s comments echo the approach that has been taken over the past 36 months during the pandemic. Protecting oneself against the COVID-19 virus, with social distancing and personal protective gear could be likened to having security measures in place to protect from cyberattacks. Utilising the vaccines and subsequent boosters is akin to being able to resist the worst of it if one is infected and be resilient in the face of a Covid infection. As well, as with the Covid-19 virus, cyberthreats continue to mount and require vigilance, with new variants of each finding their way into the wild.  

While personal health security has dominated the headlines over the past two and a half years, with some resolution in, the need for cybersecurity protection by businesses is only expanding.

Patel stressed that in response to the expanding nature of cyberthreats, Cisco is ‘’building every piece of its capabilities on a foundation of security resilience.’’ This, he added, becomes even more important in a multi cloud environment, which is where organisations are placing their attention.

He elaborated that for organisations, multi cloud environments are attractive as many organisations don’t want to ‘’put all their eggs in one basket,’’ along with their private data centre. even if that is an Azure cloud.

The challenge however, is that organisations then need to protect each of those environments in order to truly be resilient. However, he stressed that a trend with regards to inculcating resilience is through capital efficient security resilience, so as to ensure that resiliency doesn’t come with too high a price tag.

Even as resilience at the core of Cisco’s offerings, Patel stressed that the company’s approach is to ensure that it doesn't require enormous ‘’armies of people from a talent perspective.’’

“We will also make sure that we've driven automation and that we can actually deliver it in a way that's radically simpler from a management standpoint,” he concluded.